Power, yes. All they need now is an identity

Leave out line 16 of the motion... amend line 12... vote for amendment No 2 - as if this sort of thing makes a blind bit of difference to what the Government, including the Lib Dem ministers, will actually do.

You may think that all this amending and detailing is the Lib Dem representatives being carried away by the whiff of power.

Identity crisis: The average voter may be wondering what the difference is between Prime Minister David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (pictured) beyond the colour of their ties

In fact, they have always been like this. It has long made their conferences hard to take seriously.

There was an occasion a couple of generations ago when the conference was taken over by a group of rowdy, even rabid, young Liberals, and became genuinely exciting.

Then these people grew up and went off to become estate agents, peers of the realm etc, and the party relapsed into dullness.

Now, however, we must take the conference seriously - not because of its pretence to form policy, but because of the party's underlying identity crisis.

It needs to avoid becoming once more a mere vehicle of protest. And the opinion polls show an ominous trend.

The Coalition is not in any danger. Lib Dem ministers will prolong the enjoyment of power as long as possible. Talk of splits is wildly overdone.

Then they split in the Twenties. In the Thirties, even the fragments split. Then they split yet again into Liberals and National Liberals - the latter soon absorbed into the Tory Party.

The genuine Liberals emerged with just 12 seats in the 1945 election and only single figures in the Fifties contests.

The party's elders fear the triumph this time will again prove only fleeting - as, indeed, it probably will.

The middle of the road is a dangerous place.

Clegg has little room for manoeuvre because Cameron hasn't either. our debts see to that.

Perhaps the Coalition parties will work up a serious difference about AV voting. But the problem there is that voters' enthusiasm for it is definitely receding - and an identity for the Lib Dems will remain elusive.

Labour and its new leader will naturally seek to capitalise on this.

But whoever wins that contest - presumably David Miliband - will have to do better than at the BBC Question Time debate.

It was like swimming in seaweed. how many cliches can any human being extrude per minute interspersed or squeezed between protests of 'honestly', 'to be frank', 'candidly'?

Oxford, traditionally the home of lost causes, can be congratulated on producing a new school equivalent to the lesser universities' golf course management and suchlike.

The university is establishing a centre to train potential world leaders in 'the skills and responsibilities of government'.

In reality, political leadership may be learnt, but it cannot be taught.

The craft can be learnt only in the hot furnace of political life itself.

The talents that leaders need are learnt on the way up and not before they get started. The skills are not always attractive, combining cunning with a readiness to be brutal.

Politics, especially climbing to the top of the greasy pole, is a power struggle.

This needs to be practised; it is not an academic subject. It is possible to argue that university politics with all its machinations does itself offer a good guide for those wishing to study battles for status and position.

But somehow I doubt if that example of often bitter struggle will form part of the curriculum.

Holy smoke and mirrors

The Pope reminded us that the Bible and Christianity arrived in Britain more than a thousand years ago.

He was, of course, correct. But as with any statement of real or assumed fact by the Pope or his Anglican counterparts, this raises insoluble questions in the inquiring mind.

How did we manage before that? Or, to put it another way, if Christianity and baptism are essential to get to Heaven, as the Catholics insist, why did God carelessly wait so long before revealing himself to the ancient Britons?

You may also ponder why translating the Bible into English was for so long a capital offence.

Why, come to that, did God not reveal himself to others before the Jews?

The Pope also wants us to keep Christmas. But there is no evidence that the divine birth took place on December 25 or, indeed, a particular date in a particular year.

Historians believe through Gospel references to Herod - about whom we know quite a lot - that Christ was probably born in 4BC by the normal calendar.

Christmas Day was merely the continuation of the pagan feast for the depth of winter. It seems to be reverting to that anyway.